On my new PC I want to install both Linux and Windows, each on their own rather small partition, and put the big rest of the 1 TB HDD in a further partition (plus swap). Which filesystem should I use? My thoughts:

NTFS. Linux has write support, but I noticed on my external HDD a huge perfomance drop when only a few GB (of 500 GB) were left free - suddenly a few hundred MB took half an hour to copy... Any ideas why? Also no file permissions with Linux, although that is not 100% necessary but would be a bonus

fat32. Too old, won't support that partition size anyway

ext3. Windows can read for example via ext2ifs, but what about good write support? I'd even consider a small virtual machine with a tiny Linux installation to only provide a NFS share to its host windows (probably qemu, distro recommendation are appreciated)

ext4. I lack the experience with it...

It looks lke NTFS is the way to go for now (just as it was two years ago), but I'd prefer a less proprietary solution...

+1 great idea, I already forgot I read about coLinux... can you recommend a minimum distribution for this purpose? And does this offer a mapped drive maybe without having to use samba at all?
–
Tobias KienzlerDec 30 '10 at 13:53